Ofcourse there havn't been many improvments beyond "keep it close". The definition of a cache (in the non-computer sense) is someplace you keep stuff that you might need later. There have been few ground-breaking improvments on such popular caches as "the hole in the ground" and "that-drawer-on-the-left-of-my-desk-near-the-botto m-that-I-put-"stuff"-in". Outside of giving explicit control of caching to programs (which creates all kinds of sticky issues involving the ISA boundary, which means you'd proabably need a new ISA) what else do you expect? Why is that really worrying??
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Actually, a few years ago I read an article in Discover magazine about how the electoral college system can actually lead to a better decision on who the people want to be pressident... I don't remember the argument, let me see if I can find the article online... here we go (I love google) Will Hively, Math Against Tyrany. Read that, and tell me what you think.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
...about how geeky walking around like this would look, but if I could get one of thoses chorded keyboards for my desktop... spiffy. DOTE! They're $199+shiping, a little steep for my blood...
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
1. compositions of matter
2. processes or procedures
3. articles of manufacture
4. machines
5. any improvement on these patentable categories.
I think 'alogrithm' falls pretty darn smack in the middle of 'processes or procedures', so continuing:
Process inventions
A process or method invention is the operation or series of steps that leads to a useful result....
A process that uses a computer program or mathematical formula to produce a physical result , such as the computer control of a process for producing a product, may be patentable. However, the mathematical formula or method of calculation is not patentable.
That seems pretty obvious to me. When exactly was the law changed, since this is dated '97?
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Here here! It the same ppl who have problems with this who have "moral" issues with cloning. (Although I will ride the wave of moderation and reply to your 5 instead of the "morality" threads 3...) People, even if you've got an embryo, you're NOT going to get a living (complex) organism out of it. If you clone a person, you still need a women and 9 months before you have a human being, and many years more before they'd be usefull as a soldier. They still need to be raised, educated, instructed... in short, they will need to live their own life.
No, the problems won't come from cloning... in fact I see cloning as having no meaningfull effects beyond that of a "curiosity" and the previously mentioned scientific applications.
Call me when you grow a super-soldier in a vat in 6 weeks. That will impress me.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
2. Is the whole POINT. If something like wavelet compression is invented, then the company that has it has three options: keep it as a 'trade secret', give it away (open source), or patent it. If they're greedy, they'll try to keep it secret, but this will impede progess. The granting of the temporary monoploy PROMOTES progress because everyone else will get to see this new idea, and (eventually) get to use it for free. Okay, giving it away from the outset would be nice, and promote progress sooner, but being nice doesn't pay the bills, and if inventing doesn't pay somehow, it won't get done (as much).
Patents are a compromise, but also an optimazation. A compromise because "the world" gets some and "the inventor" gets some, an optimazation because no patents leads to more secrets leads to less progress AND no patents leads to less reward leads to less progress: the strenght of patent law must be balanced between extremes of less progress.
Perhaps the system is out of balance.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Yes, CT and H get the stories from the readers, so they in a sense are pre-moderated. However, they also said that/. has and will continue to change. I think some moderation of the stories would be a very good thing. Don't even make it viewable to the general public, it would just be a quick and easy way for the editors to say "Gee, no one else thought that the story I picked to go up on [Topic X] was apporopriate for the site... maybe next time I won't pick a similar story." That way, the readers can help the editors shape the direction that/. moves in, instead of placing all that responsibility on the editors. Of course, they could completely ignore it if they want, but having a way to "let 'them' know" what their readers want more of would be a good thing.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Re:Since /. apparently can't laugh at itself..
on
Humpday Quickies
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· Score: 1
Was is it that not a SINGLE parody site can get their rounded corner graphics all the way into the corner on every browser like the REAL/. does? When you view the document source, COPY IT CORRECTLY. --end stupid rant on meaningless topic--
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
I dunno, If *I* were babysitting some kids, and the place was wired with all kinds of servailance stuff, I would expect the guy who owns the place to tell me "oh by the way, you'll be watched". As creepy as that would be, I would feel less offended than if I had found out later.
And besides, the warning might help prevent some abuse.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
There is a (pretty) good reason why we have the second ammendment. Let me 'splain:
The US was created by guns, in our Revolutionary War. In that war we used guns to fight off a government that we felt was unfair. We then created a new government, one that we thought was better. The men responsible for creating that new government were very smart and said to themselves:
"you know, maybe, just maybe, this new government we're setting up won't be considered fair by some people. Yeah, we SAY that it's 'of the people, for the people, by the people,' but what if it just doesn't work out? We better have some kind of escape route so that other people can fix it. We'll make it so they can do what we did. We better make sure they can fight their oppressors. We better make sure they have some guns."
The 2nd Ammendment is the emergeny valve: there's a reason it's number 2: the only thing we consider more important than having the tools to fight off the next oppressor is the principle that we can say what we want and worship what we want. (As that predates the revolution: Europeans came to this continent in order to escape religous persecution.)
Many people seriously miss-understand the meaning of the 2nd because they miss-understand the reason for it. (Some even say there is no reason.) Now you know the reason. I make no claim as to the correctness of that reasoning, I make no statement as to my views on the subject, I mearly state the reasons.
But when laws are passed to limit the ownership of guns, to make government list of who owns what guns, I tend to wonder... considering the reason it's in the constitiution, what's their reason for that law?
Is a 'surreptitous listening device' like a gun in this sense? Ahh, a topic for another post... I need sleep.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
"A gizmo is flimsy, cheap, colorful, friendly, intriguing, easily disposable, and unlikely to harm the user. The gizmos purpose is not to efficiently perform some function or effectively provide some service. A gizmo exists to snag the users attention, and to engage the user in a vast unfolding nexus of interlinked experience."
I'll give ya intriguing and the attention snaging. The rest is garbage. I can easily imagine a solid, expensive, colorless, unfriendly, non-disposable, harmfull gizmo that is likely to harm me. Well, maybe not all at once, but definetnly several of those. I would put Zippo lighters under the heading of gizmo, for example, and Palm Pilots.
"Since gizmos are easily outmoded and inherently impermanent, their most graceful form is as disposable consumer technology."
So we can't print this out (we have to save paper), but you want a society of disposable gizmos?
"Most of all, we must never, ever again feel awestruck wonder about any manufactured device. They dont last, and are not worthy of that form of respect."
Screw you, I will be awestruck by whatever I please. You want our society to be based on this crap, but you don't want us to like it?
"We need ivory networks."
No we don't. That's just as bad, if not worse, than an ivory tower. In an ivory tower you at least get a suspicion that everyone else might be doing something different, but on an ivory network you are surrounded by like-minded individuals who constantly remind you that what your group is doing is good and right and all that, and you whole ivory networked group ends up being just as useless, if not moreso, as an cityscape of individual ivory towers. We need need to have nothing ivory.
"...we will find ourselves confronted,...with real-world avatars of those Faustian visions of power and ability that have previously existed only in myth.... Thats when our *real* trouble starts."
Blah blah, end of the world, they said it in Greece, in Rome, yadda yadda yadda...
"The so-called human condition wont survive the next hundred years."
You mean I'll no longer be able to consider the consequences of my actions? To worry about right and wrong? That I will, like an animal, react upon my instincts alone? Somehow, I doubt that. Unless you're talking about a different human condition.
Sorry folks, but I don't buy what you're hawking.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Okay, I know we all hate eToys.com, but isn't is just a little bias to have that etoy/eToys bit in the comment block and ONLY link to etoy? How about linking to the etoy/eToys story? Link to both, or link to neither. Being so blatantly biased can only hurt/.'s reputation.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Where would you be without Calculus? (Okay, Liebnitz(sp?), but still...)
Where would we be without the theory of Gravity?
Perhaps Gallileo or Davinci, and Jefferson would be a good candidate as well, but if I had to pick ONE person out of the last 1000 years, I'd go with Newton.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Apparently, whenever you change your prefrences all the tags get stripped from your old sig. You have to retype them everytime you change your preferences.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
I cannot see this being usefull. 99 times out of 100 the idea is either a) so obvious no one's even going to bother to put it in this database until after the fact, or b) so revolutionary that some company is going to use this new system, take the idea, and patent it before you do.
I mean common, a year ago would you have bothered to add the 'windowing' 'fix' for the Y2K 'bug' to such a database? It's just too stupid.
Of course, if someone can come up with an obvious programming idea which someone isn't already trying to patent, you can prove me wrong. Go on... try.
I'm afraid we'll have to continue with the "Hey, he can't patent that I did that 90 years ago!" comments and the "Well I patent air" comments until either some changes are made to the patent system or one of these patents is actually tried in court (and hopefully revoked).
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
In highschool, my family got its first computer. My brother and I both were real excited, and we started teaching ourselves QBasic (don't laugh... it's all we had) and we've been programming in pairs ever since. Works incredibly well... much fewer typos, fewer logical mistakes "Hey, what's that for loop s'pose to do?" "This? It's to do the... oh wait, you're right we don't need to do that..."
Now I can't stand to program alone... drives me nuts! I go a lot slower too. Really screwed up my CS grades last year, we were explicitly not allowed to work in pairs on the code:(
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Re:Why is LISP superior?
on
RMS The Coder
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· Score: 1
..but the bottom line is programs that are 100 pages of code in C/C++ may be 1/10th the size...
Does this translate into any improvement in the size of the compiled code? Having short snippets of uncompiled code is nice, but if it doesn't translate into some kind of savings in actual code size, I dislike giving up 'a little speed'.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
What's with that? What ever happened to the good old days when we just strap a couple guys to a few million pounds of explosive liquids, lit a match under them and zoooOOOOMMM, off we go, if they die, screw it, we'll send up some more, we can afford it, we're America! Heck, why havn't we done this for a trip to Mars? Yeah, a couple people might get killed on the way, but such is the price of science, right? I mean, they did volunter to be astronauts, right, no ones making them do this.
...
(I hope they realize that I'm kidding.)
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Slashdot Mirror
Also, learn != evolve. Plus, the whole point is that they learn. And that stupid paperclip could definitly use it.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
From mycounsel.com:
I think 'alogrithm' falls pretty darn smack in the middle of 'processes or procedures', so continuing: That seems pretty obvious to me. When exactly was the law changed, since this is dated '97?God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
You will never be rich, until you are dead.
Painters have fessed-up to this fact, why can't RIAA?
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Solyent green is people!
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
No, the problems won't come from cloning... in fact I see cloning as having no meaningfull effects beyond that of a "curiosity" and the previously mentioned scientific applications.
Call me when you grow a super-soldier in a vat in 6 weeks. That will impress me.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
2. Is the whole POINT. If something like wavelet compression is invented, then the company that has it has three options: keep it as a 'trade secret', give it away (open source), or patent it. If they're greedy, they'll try to keep it secret, but this will impede progess. The granting of the temporary monoploy PROMOTES progress because everyone else will get to see this new idea, and (eventually) get to use it for free. Okay, giving it away from the outset would be nice, and promote progress sooner, but being nice doesn't pay the bills, and if inventing doesn't pay somehow, it won't get done (as much).
Patents are a compromise, but also an optimazation. A compromise because "the world" gets some and "the inventor" gets some, an optimazation because no patents leads to more secrets leads to less progress AND no patents leads to less reward leads to less progress: the strenght of patent law must be balanced between extremes of less progress.
Perhaps the system is out of balance.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
And besides, the warning might help prevent some abuse.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
The US was created by guns, in our Revolutionary War. In that war we used guns to fight off a government that we felt was unfair. We then created a new government, one that we thought was better. The men responsible for creating that new government were very smart and said to themselves:
"you know, maybe, just maybe, this new government we're setting up won't be considered fair by some people. Yeah, we SAY that it's 'of the people, for the people, by the people,' but what if it just doesn't work out? We better have some kind of escape route so that other people can fix it. We'll make it so they can do what we did. We better make sure they can fight their oppressors. We better make sure they have some guns."
The 2nd Ammendment is the emergeny valve: there's a reason it's number 2: the only thing we consider more important than having the tools to fight off the next oppressor is the principle that we can say what we want and worship what we want. (As that predates the revolution: Europeans came to this continent in order to escape religous persecution.)
Many people seriously miss-understand the meaning of the 2nd because they miss-understand the reason for it. (Some even say there is no reason.) Now you know the reason. I make no claim as to the correctness of that reasoning, I make no statement as to my views on the subject, I mearly state the reasons.
But when laws are passed to limit the ownership of guns, to make government list of who owns what guns, I tend to wonder... considering the reason it's in the constitiution, what's their reason for that law?
Is a 'surreptitous listening device' like a gun in this sense? Ahh, a topic for another post... I need sleep.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
I'll give ya intriguing and the attention snaging. The rest is garbage. I can easily imagine a solid, expensive, colorless, unfriendly, non-disposable, harmfull gizmo that is likely to harm me. Well, maybe not all at once, but definetnly several of those. I would put Zippo lighters under the heading of gizmo, for example, and Palm Pilots.
"Since gizmos are easily outmoded and inherently impermanent, their most graceful form is as disposable consumer technology."
So we can't print this out (we have to save paper), but you want a society of disposable gizmos?
"Most of all, we must never, ever again feel awestruck wonder about any manufactured device. They dont last, and are not worthy of that form of respect."
Screw you, I will be awestruck by whatever I please. You want our society to be based on this crap, but you don't want us to like it?
"We need ivory networks."
No we don't. That's just as bad, if not worse, than an ivory tower. In an ivory tower you at least get a suspicion that everyone else might be doing something different, but on an ivory network you are surrounded by like-minded individuals who constantly remind you that what your group is doing is good and right and all that, and you whole ivory networked group ends up being just as useless, if not moreso, as an cityscape of individual ivory towers. We need need to have nothing ivory.
"...we will find ourselves confronted, ...with real-world avatars of those Faustian visions of power and ability that have previously existed only in myth. ... Thats when our *real* trouble starts."
Blah blah, end of the world, they said it in Greece, in Rome, yadda yadda yadda...
"The so-called human condition wont survive the next hundred years."
You mean I'll no longer be able to consider the consequences of my actions? To worry about right and wrong? That I will, like an animal, react upon my instincts alone? Somehow, I doubt that. Unless you're talking about a different human condition.
Sorry folks, but I don't buy what you're hawking.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Where would you be without Calculus? (Okay, Liebnitz(sp?), but still...)
Where would we be without the theory of Gravity?
Perhaps Gallileo or Davinci, and Jefferson would be a good candidate as well, but if I had to pick ONE person out of the last 1000 years, I'd go with Newton.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
I mean common, a year ago would you have bothered to add the 'windowing' 'fix' for the Y2K 'bug' to such a database? It's just too stupid.
Of course, if someone can come up with an obvious programming idea which someone isn't already trying to patent, you can prove me wrong. Go on... try.
I'm afraid we'll have to continue with the "Hey, he can't patent that I did that 90 years ago!" comments and the "Well I patent air" comments until either some changes are made to the patent system or one of these patents is actually tried in court (and hopefully revoked).
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Now I can't stand to program alone... drives me nuts! I go a lot slower too. Really screwed up my CS grades last year, we were explicitly not allowed to work in pairs on the code :(
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Does this translate into any improvement in the size of the compiled code? Having short snippets of uncompiled code is nice, but if it doesn't translate into some kind of savings in actual code size, I dislike giving up 'a little speed'.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
What's with that? What ever happened to the good old days when we just strap a couple guys to a few million pounds of explosive liquids, lit a match under them and zoooOOOOMMM, off we go, if they die, screw it, we'll send up some more, we can afford it, we're America! Heck, why havn't we done this for a trip to Mars? Yeah, a couple people might get killed on the way, but such is the price of science, right? I mean, they did volunter to be astronauts, right, no ones making them do this.
(I hope they realize that I'm kidding.)
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein